CAROLINE WATSON

​Caroline is the founder and director of Hua Dan, one of China’s first and leading social enterprises.

Hua Dan uses the power of participation in drama-based workshops to reveal and develop individual and community potential. Hua Dan has a particular focus on working with China’s rural-to-urban migrant workers, particularly women, who work in the manufacturing and service industries, at the heart of China’s economic boom.

In founding Hua Dan, Caroline has pioneered the importance of participation in the arts and creative education in a country that has no precedent for anything other than a hierarchical, rote-learning education model; empowered female migrants from the countryside to lead and manage the organisation through a vocational training model; and refined a sustainable hybrid non-profit/for-profit business model for arts-based learning methodologies.

Caroline's Hua Dan story as noted by the media internationally makes her an authoritative and inspiring writer and speaker on the intersection of the arts for social change, women’s empowerment, global leadership, entrepreneurship and social innovation and spirituality.